Asphodel
“My regrets follow you to the grave.”
Lily watches the smoke tumble from her lips, polluting the same air she used to blow bubbles into as a kid. Even at night, the summer heat overwhelms her. Denim jeans stick to her legs, curls to her back. The straps of her tank top dig into her freckled shoulders. Around her, moths are drawn to the streetlamps, desperate for a glimpse of light.
She feels him before her senses pick up on him at all. Lily has felt his presence since long before they went to school, when their minds were nothing but flower fields. Maybe it’s his magic she feels. She knows that if she asked, that’s what he’d say. But she always felt that it was different. In a starry-eyed sense, it felt cosmic. She could feel him like the hair on her arm felt the gentle breeze.
It’s different than at school. Back there they barely spoke, even in those first few years where they were both grappling for normality. They’d linger in courtyards and skip lunch to hang upside-down on each other's beds.
But summer? Summers were sacred.
Nothing could hurt them during summer. Everything was brighter. There was a harsh, melodramatic romanticization to it. Everything fell into technicolor lights and flowers that never died. They were kids again.
And while she’d love to pretend that it could still be that way, God. She’d love to haul him through her window and make him wish on the stars she’d stuck on her ceiling again. She knows she can’t. It’s different. He’s different. She can feel it now, in the way he tenses as he walks up to her.
It’s like playing cards, in a way. She traded her ace. Lily got new friends, she moved on. And in all that, in the flurry and rush of growing up, she grew out of him. It wasn’t supposed to happen that way.
As a kid, God, as a kid she swore they’d get married. Lily was crafty, she knew that wasn’t on the table. So, she left him behind. He was never going to be her white picket fence, even when she was a kid she knew that. Even when he swore they’d be together forever. At eleven years old he told her she was the love of his life.
And God knows she loved him. She loved him more at twelve years old than she’d loved anybody her entire life.
At sixteen, under the night sky at the same playground they’d exchanged imaginary rings when they were kids, she thinks she might still.
“Lilliana.” He greets, his voice firmer than it used to be. More sure of itself, and somehow weary at the same time.
Severus is the only person in the entire world who still calls her Lilliana. Every time he says it he says it like it hurts. And every single time, even still, her heart skips a beat.
He vanishes her cigarette, and only then does she look down and realize that it had burnt through the filter, nearly to her fingertips. Severus comes into her eye line, leaning against the floor of the playground she’s sitting on, holding up the slides for children. Even though she’s elevated, he’s her height standing up. It hurts, in a strange, awful way. She finds herself wanting to ask stupid questions, teary eyed, like ‘When did you get so tall?’ Even though they both know the answer.
They both changed.
His hair curls past his ears, his eyes are darker, and have the kind of exhaustion that looks like it’s painted on. His freckles are gone. It’s hard to believe he even had them at all.
“Sev,” It comes out jumbled through her waterlogged throat. And though it might just be her imagination, she swears she saw him flinch. He hands her another cigarette from his own box, one of the few muggle relics he kept. In fact, he stands in front of her now in dark wizard robes with his wand on a hollister around his wrists. He keeps the cigarettes for her though.
She never could let go of old things.
“Thank you.” Lily mumbles, lighting it with the snap of her fingers.
He nods. He’s so poised now, hardly anything at the surface.
Severus used to be an overflowing cup, he’d spill and cry and laugh.
“Do you remember,” His voice is light, remnant like he's narrating a story. “When we used to find those clearings, the ones with ponds?”
And Lily can’t look away. Because there’s the slightest uptick of his lips, one truer than she’s seen in years. It makes her smile, that in of itself, and she does remember. She used to think it was magic, the way they found beautiful places. Clearings covered in sprawling willow trees with thick, hanging vines draped over ponds. Or it’d be a shop covered in all of their favorite things. When they were kids, and when they were together, everything felt grand, and beautiful as a secret.
Lily laughs, and he looks over like he can’t help himself. His eyes soften in that way that makes her weak. “Yeah, I do.”
Severus crosses his arms, seemingly unsure of what to do with them.
For a moment she thinks of holding his hand. She used to do it all the time, always there to ground him if things ever got bad.
She keeps her hand on the playground metal.
“I miss you Lily.” His eyes are so earnest.
Sometimes, when she looks back on their past she's almost embarrassed. Because she would’ve done anything to hear him say that when they were fourteen. In her mind, she remembers it as begging for his love. She wonders if it’s different in his, if he ever rationalized their falling out as her fault.
The bitter truth is that it was both of them.
So her heart crumbles and dies, wilting like her namesake.
She knows that he misses her. It’s not as if she doesn’t miss him too. But when she thinks about how cold he's been, the friends he hangs out with. The ones who want her kind dead. Lily feels sick to her stomach.
And all at once, like a freight train of acceptance, she just knows she can’t be friends with him again like they once were. She can talk to him in courtyards, and fall asleep on a pile of books beside him in the library, but she can’t let him in like that again.
Lily can’t fall in love with Severus Snape more than once.
Without saying a word, she jumps off the elevated playground floor and turns to face him. She stubs her cigarette out and, carefully as if handling a butterfly, drags her fingertips over the crease of his eyebrow, and tucks a lock of hair behind his ear.
Lily gives him room to move forward, to say something, anything.
If he had said anything else, a ‘sorry’. If he had moved forward and kissed her– Then maybe things would’ve been different.
Or maybe he just had to say he missed her two years ago.
“If only you’d said that to me before.”
But he didn't.
“Goodnight Severus.”
Lily spun on her heel and left him standing there.